Every Monday night I like to unwind from a long day of teaching statistics by drawing and painting with my friend (who happens to be an artistic genius) Christopher Tradowsky. Often our drawings and paintings involve scenarios involving human/animal interaction that are unlikely to occur in real life. Here is a small sampling of our collaboration:

Last night, Christopher was otherwise engaged, so I decided to make use of my new Shiny skills and create a Drawing Ideas Generator which can serve as inspiration for future drawing sessions.

This shiny app uses R to scrape names of animals, fascinating celebrities (at least according to Barbara Walters), and words ending in ‘ing’ from various sources on the internet. Then on the back end I use R to randomly combine these as subject, present-tense participles, and objects to create really ridiculous scenarios that I find to be quite inspiring! There are a total of 3,017,427,800 different combinations, but since this app scrapes words from the internet, that will change if the source websites are updated.